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andrewduckerI've been thinking about Slash ever since I opened my mouth without bulletproofing myself.
Having read the Schindler's List Fanfic/Slash a little later, it's not actually that bad. Well, it's not terrible writing, and it's not offensive.
Except.... except it's solidified something that's been nagging at me for a while - the thing that I've realised I don't like about Slash.
It started with a link that Yonmei sent me to a FAQ page about Slash-writing, which gave various examples of relationships between people, and then said "They sounded romantic, yes? But we changed the genders around, and the people in each case were both men!" (and yes, I'm parapgrasing from memory, as I can't find the page again). This had the implication that as these relationships _could_ be romantic, therefore reframing them as romantic was a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
And I then realised that the problem was that the Slash people seem to think that it's impossible for any relationship to be non-sexual. That if one person cares for another, it must be because they want to have sex with them. If a person enjoys another's company it's because they are desperate for sweaty lovemaking with them. If a person loves someone else, it's because of lust.
Taking the relationship between Oskar Schindler and Itzhak Stern and saying that they worked together to save thousands of lives because Oskar couldn't get Itzhak's sexy looks out of his head takes an incredibly noble act and a great friendship and reduces it to animal attraction. And while I have nothing against animal attraction (it's great!), it's as bad as the idea of Aragorn fighting for Middle Earth because Arwen is threatened - suddenly he's not a hero fighting for all mankind - he's just some guy protecting his girlfriend.
It's reminiscient of the people that think that Men and Women can't be friends, because Men want to shag any woman they know - apparently men and men can't be friends, because deep down they want to shag.
(Oh, and all of the above applies to male/female relationships too, 'Het' fiction annoys me just as much.)
Having read the Schindler's List Fanfic/Slash a little later, it's not actually that bad. Well, it's not terrible writing, and it's not offensive.
Except.... except it's solidified something that's been nagging at me for a while - the thing that I've realised I don't like about Slash.
It started with a link that Yonmei sent me to a FAQ page about Slash-writing, which gave various examples of relationships between people, and then said "They sounded romantic, yes? But we changed the genders around, and the people in each case were both men!" (and yes, I'm parapgrasing from memory, as I can't find the page again). This had the implication that as these relationships _could_ be romantic, therefore reframing them as romantic was a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
And I then realised that the problem was that the Slash people seem to think that it's impossible for any relationship to be non-sexual. That if one person cares for another, it must be because they want to have sex with them. If a person enjoys another's company it's because they are desperate for sweaty lovemaking with them. If a person loves someone else, it's because of lust.
Taking the relationship between Oskar Schindler and Itzhak Stern and saying that they worked together to save thousands of lives because Oskar couldn't get Itzhak's sexy looks out of his head takes an incredibly noble act and a great friendship and reduces it to animal attraction. And while I have nothing against animal attraction (it's great!), it's as bad as the idea of Aragorn fighting for Middle Earth because Arwen is threatened - suddenly he's not a hero fighting for all mankind - he's just some guy protecting his girlfriend.
It's reminiscient of the people that think that Men and Women can't be friends, because Men want to shag any woman they know - apparently men and men can't be friends, because deep down they want to shag.
(Oh, and all of the above applies to male/female relationships too, 'Het' fiction annoys me just as much.)
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Date: 2003-12-26 01:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-26 01:11 pm (UTC)Sorry, that should have been clearer.
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Date: 2003-12-27 05:17 am (UTC)Surely slash is no different to, say, good SF. It takes a core idea and looks at the world through it. 'What would the story be like if it was all about the lust'?
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Date: 2003-12-27 05:27 am (UTC)Because fiction is full of relationships based around sex, so to take ones that are based around the vast number of reasons people with each other and say "Oh, actually it's just sex, not respect, loyalty, duty, friendship, mutual goals, need or anything else" takes it much further away from anything I care about.
None of the relationships in my life are exclusively about sex, very few of them have a strong sexual component. It's bad enough that so much of the media is obsessed with sex, taking the few bits that aren't and changing them to be about sex is taking away the bits I care about.
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Date: 2003-12-27 06:07 am (UTC)See, I view Slash as somewhere along the continuum of speculative fiction.
As I said on yonmei's LJ, I see slash as a psychological tool, rather than a political statement. Gayness isn't political to me. And to be honest, _slash_ fiction isn't important to me - sexualised fiction interests me. The fact that the characters are male (or female) really doesn't.
So I see slash as a bit like the Wold Newton universe. A big 'what if?' Does a sexual connection between Angel and Spike make an interesting difference to the stories? How about a sexual connection between Kirk and Spock?
And does that shed any light on the characters?
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Date: 2003-12-28 03:13 pm (UTC)And does that shed any light on the characters?"
But.... you could have all that without the actual SEX. It's like a PG movie, or a daytime TV show - you KNOW they shag, but you don't need the gory details (unless it's Heather Graham, then it's the more the better). And the impact on the stories is just as valid.
Funny, to me what you said actually seems to be making Andy's point for him - relationships are about far more than the actual act of sex.
As far as my very limited exposure goes, slash seems far more about the actual act, than about exploring the avenues these new relationships create with established characters.
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Date: 2003-12-28 10:51 pm (UTC)The last couple of stories I've written are based around a relationship that functions on far more levels than just sex. Especially since although there's attraction and/or affection on both sides the only sex has been with people external to the main relationship or pure fantasy by one character. But it's still slash because I have a canon character attracted to another canon character of the same sex.
Gina
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Date: 2003-12-27 06:16 am (UTC)If I write a fanfic in which two of the central characters are self-identified as gay or bi but don't fancy each other I'm still going to get the majority of anti-slash people condemning me as if I write one in which two characters of the same gender are shagging but there's no queer politics in there at all.
Gina
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Date: 2003-12-27 12:18 pm (UTC)I think I'll go search out some B5 femslash now...
Gina
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Date: 2003-12-26 01:02 pm (UTC)I dunno, I've never understood why wanting to boink someone precluded being friends with them, m'self. It always seemed to me like that sentiment was the first step down the road of 'she wanted it, look how she was dressed, how was I supposed to resist that?'
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Date: 2003-12-26 01:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-26 02:21 pm (UTC)It speaks to some sort of weird inability to understand that sexual attraction is just a factor, not some sort of all-encompassing drive...which is also the basis of the 'she was asking for it, how was I supposed to resist her temptation?' line of thought.
And I have some experience with very high libido, having had a variety of hormone imbalance issues. I've had points in my life where I needed to masturbate several times a day, and even once things were more under control, I'm a very sexual person. I meet a lot of people who I think it'd be fun to boink. But it's not really different to me than meeting someone who I think it'd be fun to have long conversations with...
I'm not sure if I really answered your question, though.
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Date: 2003-12-26 04:30 pm (UTC)Yep.
Yep, yep, yep.
Sometimes it's better to just let that attraction simmer. Just because you can doesn't mean ya hafta, ya know.
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Date: 2003-12-27 05:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-27 05:15 am (UTC)Brilliant, yes.
Sexual attraction is *often* central to how guys examine their relationships, or compare them, IMHO. And I've known a lot of chaps who've said 'But I have friends _here_ and lovers over _there_'. There's a dividing line.
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Date: 2003-12-26 01:34 pm (UTC)Same here. Being a female engineer I've always had quite a lot of male friends. Sometimes there's an attraction, sometimes there isn't, but the friendship is the same in either case.
I wonder if being able to combine friendship with attraction is anything to do with the way that women pretty much grow up knowing that they can't shag everyone they want to because if they do they'll end up with A Reputation, so we are taught very early that we need to develop self-control and make decisions about whether to have sex based on factors other than just whether we'd like to or not.
Whereas (heterosexual) men are traditionally brought up to believe that the limiting factor on how much sex they have is not their own self control but whether the woman will agree to it or not, so maybe they find it harder to regard sexual attraction as just one among many factors in a relationship or a friendship?
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Date: 2003-12-27 05:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-28 06:17 am (UTC)I don't really recall that having 'a reputation' was ever an issue with any of the girls that I grew up with. Nobody really cared, as far as I can recall. Now getting pregnant really young, that was sometimes seen as stupid (but not unusual), but mostly no-one seemed to be bothered.
But maybe it was just my famous ability to be oblivious to social nuance, rather than that 80's scotland was really like that.
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Date: 2003-12-26 05:24 pm (UTC)It can be very hard to do.
I get along with men better than women (I'm a woman, of course) so I have a lot of male friends. What I've learned, however, is that I have to be SO careful with them, or they'll decide they want something more, and then everything gets awkward and I wind up feeling like a complete ass.
Still, even if this is the way that a lot of men behave, I agree that glorifying it in fiction is annoying. Saying 'If I'm friends with her, I have to boink her because I have an uncontrollable drive' is like voluntarily giving up your free will and enslaving yourself to some imagined animal nature. That's really sad. Personally, if *I'm* going to have sex with a guy, I'd rather it be because he chose to have sex with me, rather than because the monkey within chose for him based on the smell of my sweat, or whatever.
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Date: 2003-12-26 01:18 pm (UTC)Personaly, yeah. I don't like fic which assumes that all relationships have to be sexual. Actually, it bothers me more with het than slash, because (as someone else said first) in a heterocentric world, there's less reason why the mixed-sex relationship wouldn't be played out on screen if the chemistry existed.
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Date: 2003-12-26 01:22 pm (UTC)And I have nothing against people writing porn if it turns them on, but if you're going to take it seriously then it enters the territory I mention above...
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Date: 2003-12-26 02:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-26 01:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-26 01:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-26 01:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-26 02:37 pm (UTC)And I then realised that the problem was that the Slash people seem to think that it's impossible for any relationship to be non-sexual.
Slash doesn't necessarily assume that the close relationship on screen *is* sexual in nature. Sometimes slash is just "what if it were".
When I read (or watch) LotR, I don't actually think that Merry and Pippin are getting it on. But I slash them because I like to think they they are. When I read Hitchhiker's Guide, I don't think that Ford and Arthur are sparking with sexual tension, but I've slashed them because it was fun to do.
OTOH, Mulder and Krycek, Buffy and Faith -- yeah, there was definite sexual tension there, on the screen. Buffy and Willow, though, have a close relationship that I don't think is at all sexual, despite Willow being canonically gay.
I don't only write slash -- I like het too. And gen, though I write that more rarely.
A lot of the time, it's up for interpretation. And since no lives are at stake, I tend to choose the interpretation that's the most fun for me, that's all. I suggest that everyone else do the same.
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Date: 2003-12-26 02:54 pm (UTC)It's good for a giggle.
But gods I can still see the actual way it's supposed to be! If somethings good and noble and wonderful about a story why change it?
I swear if I hear one more Sam and frodo comment I'll strangle them. Tightly... with shaking. Maybe their neck will snap first... >.<
but yes well said!
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Date: 2003-12-26 04:06 pm (UTC)*cough*
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Date: 2003-12-26 05:00 pm (UTC)I read slash fic, pretty much only in Buffy fandom, but it has never even remotely occurred to me to believe that the pairings in slash fandom bear any resemblance to actual relationships that existed on the show. I would never, for example, say that Xander and Spike (on Buffy) had the hots for each other ... but that doesn't mean I don't enjoy reading fics in which they do. It's entertainment, not an assertion of fact.
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Date: 2003-12-26 10:08 pm (UTC)Emotional closeness doesn't mandate sexual closeness. And some of us are also capable of being friends with someone we're sexually involved with instead of the sex forcing it into becoming a Serious Relationship(tm). Hell, emotional closeness plus sexual closeness doesn't always become Twu Wuv, either.
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Date: 2003-12-27 02:32 am (UTC)And I'm never going to give up on the idea that Action Heroes don't have to be white, middle-class, heterosexual, able-bodied and male all at the same time. So I'm a slash writer. Even when there's no sex in the story. Even when there isn't even a single thought of sex in any character's head in a story.
Gina
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Date: 2003-12-28 03:32 pm (UTC)But yeah, I'll give you the rest.
Still, what about those Hobbits, eh? There's heroes for you... ;+)
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Date: 2003-12-28 10:54 pm (UTC)Gina
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Date: 2003-12-29 04:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-29 04:53 am (UTC)Gina
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Date: 2003-12-28 03:06 pm (UTC)Nail. Head. Agreed. And that's why I don't like slash. ALL slash. Because while I'm not a homophobe in any shape or form (or I wouldn't keep tickling Greg when I walk past him ;+), as Yonmei would like to think I am, I quite simply find no enjoyment in reading about same-sex, well, sex. It just doesn't do it for me.
If slash didn't have the sex, it wouldn't be slash. It'd be Mills and Boon....
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Date: 2003-12-28 03:15 pm (UTC)And I was never entirely sure. Not that it matters.
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Date: 2003-12-28 11:05 pm (UTC)I'm not that bothered for the most part about stories that are just about sex, although I am prepared to make an exception for drabbles, half-drabbles and sets of drabbles because that's about painting a picture in a set number of words and is a particular skill that I wish I was better at.
Gina
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Date: 2003-12-29 04:41 am (UTC)But well-written, non-sexual slash is definitely in the minority, that's all. Anyone whos being fair will admit it's far easier to find sexual slash on the 'net, than it is to find non-sexual slash.
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Date: 2003-12-29 05:00 am (UTC)Gina
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Date: 2003-12-28 07:37 pm (UTC)I don't think anyone with real respect for writing, whether they're a slash/yaoi fan or not, likes to see stories that emphasize sex as the most important & indispensable factor, because people with respect for writing also generally have respect for realism--& in real life, there are quite a lot of things more important than sex.
I was linked to you by
-Callisto
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Date: 2004-02-04 09:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-07 02:13 pm (UTC)(1) If slash is about exploring possibilities, why does it appear (based on the comments-- I haven't read slash myself) that the main possibility people want to explore is sexual tension or activity? You know, there's quite a lot of that on TV already. Even same-sex sexuality is explored by network TV innuendo now, plus Queer Film Festivals from San Francisco to Minneapolis explore both serious issues and porn. So, my question is, why not explore less-frequently-explored possibilities? What if Harry and Sally in When Harry Met Sally had decided to stay “just friends,” and one of their later spouses got jealous of their friendship and they had to stand up for each other? That might be a good plot. Or what if after Frodo took his ship to that faraway land, it turned out to have a culture like America, and men thought he was "hitting on them" if he showed affection in friendship; maybe he got gaybashed for kissing some fellow the same way he kissed Sam in the movie, and maybe he found some romantic interest over there (you pick the gender) and they both got fed up with it and came back to the Shire for a happy reunion?
(2) It seems that "same-sex relationship" and "gay relationship" are conflated in so much discussion of the topic. They aren't the same thing. The majority of same-sex kissing and hand-holding worldwide is between straight men or women as an expression of friendship. Men and women around the world have Frodo-and-Sam moments with their best friends too-- I remember reading a news story about a couple of Mexican friends who grew up together, and later traveled north together to find better jobs to support their families. They traveled together as friends, and, as a result of tragic errors by a smuggler, died together as friends.
Isn't that a better story than anything about Oskar Schindler having gay sex? Throw in some scenes of childhood friendship, and something heartbreaking about their families losing their farms due to "trade liberalization," written by somebody far more articulate than myself, and you've got yourself a good plot for a tragic drama.
Moving beyond fiction-writing for a second, why is the real-life gay rights movement only defending the sexual and marriage aspects of my rights to same-sex love? I don't see movement people even talking about the fact that some of the practices that are seen as "risque" public displays of affection by gay couples here (such as cheek kissing or holding hands) are actually normal for straight people all around the world! Hey movement folks, if you're so hip to protecting my right to express same-sex love, why not do something about that? You know, my ex-boyfriend was not the guy I loved most so far, it was my best friend from college, and he ran away because his wife was jealous of our "too intense" friendship. A little public education about the fact that MOST people worldwide have the occasional intense (albeit nonsexual) same-sex relationship, would have gone a certain way towards creating a cultural environment where he wouldn't feel "bad" for having strong feelings about his male friends, and his wife wouldn't feel threatened. Oh, but I guess you were too busy getting mad because the Minneapolis park board took away your anonymous-cruising ground to build a bike path (one of many silly local gay issues I have run into). Too bad, so sad! So much for protecting my interest in "same sex love"!
dave
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Date: 2004-08-09 07:22 am (UTC)I came back to this post because someone else linked to it, and by god this is the silliest comment on it...
Silliness
Date: 2004-08-09 12:13 pm (UTC)You have made the same mistake as me, though. Why are my proposals that the gay rights movement educate people in respecting a broad range of same-sex affection (including nonsexual affection between straights, very common throughout the world), "silly"? It is no more silly than most of the mainline issues of the gay movement were considered to be at one time. Consider: homophobic sentiment can generally be summarized with the idea "You don't always get what you want, you can't marry someone of the same sex, now grow up and get with the program, and form a family which society accepts." And the same idea is behind gay people who look down on bi people for "not being able to make up their mind," or on trans people, or who ridicule the new asexuality movement (www.asexuality.org) out of the belief that "everybody is sexual so those who say they aren't must be mentally ill." And devaluing friendship is based on the same logic of "my relationship form is the only sacred type" that is used by straight homophobes. Throughout the development of the "LGBT" acronym, each group has looked down on the newcomers in much the same way that straight people had previously looked down on them.
Gay marriage, the cause celebre of the present-day movement, has every reason to be suspect in this regard. Straight people have been using their marriages as excuses to abandon youthful commitments to friends, look down on single people, and write laws that provide benefits only to other married people like themselves, for ages. How do we know that gay-marriage advocates aren't looking to do the same thing? My attitudes about friendship (www.celebratefriendship.org) may seem silly, but if you grant two men who are having sex with each other a legal covenant for visitation or shared health benefits or a religious ceremony in front of a church, because of the putative "sacredness" of that sexual relationship, exactly what points can you present that make it different from a nonsexual relationship between people who feel just as strongly? You reprinted part of a "Dykes to Watch Out For" comic strip, and of course, the Dykes are a communal household including both lovers and friends. Should only some of them be able to visit the others in the hospital, based on having a "suitable" sexual/romantic relationship? If so, why? Or, if gay people should have the right to confer health benefits on their partner, why shouldn't a single person be able to use their "spousal benefit" for a friend without insurance? The official argument for the former is "equal pay for equal work"; the same argument applies to single Dykes as well as partnered ones.
A queer person from a communal household could throw the ball back at you by claiming that gay marriage is itself "silly." You can already gain many of the legal benefits of marriage through documents like wills, power of attorney, etc. So why do you need marriage? And if I am expected to not care if my culture dismisses the importance of my lifelong friendships, and distrusts my motives, then, why should I care if the culture dismisses the importance of your gay partnership and won't celebrate it in a mainline church?
If you want me to support your rights in, say, a gay partnership situation, I feel I have the right to expect a movement which supports broader diversity than just marriage, which is mostly what my point was about. Otherwise, the homophobes are right in saying you want "special rights"-- you want to have partnered queers join the "mainstream" while every other type of alternative family gets shunted back in the closet again.
Dave
www.celebratefriendship.org
Resources for an expanded version of family diversity:
- www.atmp.org
- www.celebratefriendship.org
- www.asexuality.org